Last Wednesday about 8 of us took a tour of Stone Brewing‘s new facility in Escondido and AleSmith in San Diego. Keith Bender from Stone was exceptionally nice to drive us around and be our host.
Stone’s new brewery is big and, well, new. The tour is great, the gentleman who leads it is very good at communicating how everything works. As I have found with winery tours, my favorite part is tasting the raw ingredients and then tasting the beer. We sampled the malted barley they use, with different roasts that go into different beers, and a couple different kinds of hops.
Stone also is opening a restaurant at this location. It’s still under construction although the kitchen looks almost done. We got a tour and it is clearly going to be a very nice place.
In contrast to Stone’s shiny new building, AleSmith has a small space in an industrial park in Kearny Mesa. I believe only 5 people work there, and we saw their bottling line, which fills 4 — yes, four — bottles every run. In spite of what I’m sure are challenges of being such small scale, AleSmith is making and selling lots of very, very good beer. And they’re very likeable folks, too.
We ended the tour by having a couple rounds (and some good grub) at Liar’s Club.
Thanks to everyone who helped put this together for us!
Something about this looks familiar…
Alex is the real King of Beers.